Fossils unearthed in Ethiopia are reshaping our view of human evolution. Instead of a straight march from ape-like ancestors to modern humans, researchers now see a tangled, branching tree with ...

Life on Earth began in a way that still boggles the mind. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a chemical process called abiogenesis occurred, where life emerged from non-life. Imagine a hot, watery mix of ...

Researchers at the University of Maine are theorizing that human beings may be in the midst of a major evolutionary shift—driven not by genes, but by culture. "Human evolution seems to be changing ...

This has been quite the wild year in human evolution stories. Our relatives, living and extinct, got a lot of attention—from new developments in ape cognition to an expanded perspective of a ...

A composite view of the Earth constructed by NASA from multiple satellite images Editor at Large Human evolution is a story writ slow. It’s been about 3.8 billion years since life on Earth emerged and ...

On Valentine’s Day in 2018, a team of scientists walked across a flat expanse in the badlands of northeastern Ethiopia, scanning the ground for fossils. An eagle-eyed field assistant, Omar Abdulla, ...

A timeline of genetic changes in millions of years of human evolution shows that variants linked to higher intelligence appeared most rapidly around 500,000 years ago, and were closely followed by ...

A digital reconstruction of a million-year-old skull suggests humans may have diverged from our ancient ancestors 400,000 years earlier than thought and in Asia, not Africa, a study found. The ...

Human evolution has long been tied to growing brain size, and new research suggests prenatal hormones may have played a surprising role. By studying the relative lengths of index and ring fingers — a ...